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Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
John Milton was an English radical polemicist and poet, whose magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has influenced artistic endeavours since its publication. On the 350th anniversary of his death, Islam Issa explores the story of the man who lived in revolutionary times, and who lost two wives, his liberty and his sight – but never his hope
John Milton was an early riser. He woke each morning with poetry in his head, itching for it to be recorded. The verses came to him during the night, he said – a special delivery from his very own lyrical muse. By 1652, he had completely lost his sight, so the disgruntled Milton had to wait patiently for a scribe to arrive. In the popular imagination, one of them was his daughter, Deborah, who has been depicted putting pen to paper as her father dictates his intricate poetry. Milton’s biographer wrote that on some days, when it took longer than usual for someone to begin transcribing, the poet “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked”. That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete. It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost. Tumultuous times John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics. The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy. In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an interest payment from a landowner to whom his father had lent money years earlier. By the time he returned to London, he had tied the knot with the debtor’s daughter. This marriage to Mary Powell – at 17, half his age – lasted just a few weeks. It’s long been assumed that Milton must have been difficult to live with. A more obvious cause of the rift was politics: the first rumblings of the Civil War were growing, and the Powell family’s strong royalist views were incompatible with Milton’s staunch republicanism. In any case, when Mary abandoned him and returned to her family, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to addressing the topic of divorce. The law of the time offered a separation agreement “from bed and board” that didn’t go as far as terminating the marriage. Dissolution “from the bond of marriage” was valid only on grounds of adultery. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published as an anonymous and unlicensed pamphlet, made the radical argument that a breakdown due to “indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind” should be sufficient grounds. Milton was well ahead of his time. It was another three centuries before parliament passed the Divorce Reform Act 1969, legalising no-fault divorce on the grounds of an “irretrievable breakdown”. To his contemporaries, however, Milton’s justifications for divorce were likely the most controversial of all his opinions. They led to open attacks that reached parliament (by now his name was associated publicly with the book), where he was condemned and where members pushed for state control over unregistered books, including Milton’s contentious tract. Under the Licensing Order of 1643, every book produced had to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton penned a strong and impassioned case opposing the policy. In Areopagitica, which became his most famous polemic, he defended freedom of expression and compared suppressing books to killing humans – in fact, he wrote, it might be even more deplorable, because it “slays an immortality rather than a life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL348130-5dfa773-e1731929244146.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" title="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" /> Republican ideals Milton was most prolific when expounding his diehard republican beliefs. During the 1640s, he spent much of his time writing poetry and prose that supported the militant anti-monarchical movement. When the republican army’s commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, besieged Colchester in 1648, Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”. That poem also suggested that the job of opposing the tyranny of inherited power remained unfinished: “O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; / For what can war, but endless war still breed, / Till truth, and right from violence be freed.” Early the next year, parliament indicted Charles I. Fairfax, meanwhile, was overshadowed by a subordinate commander, Oliver Cromwell, who became the island’s most influential statesman – and in whom Milton placed high hopes. Listen | Browse the HistoryExtra archive of podcasts on the Civil War, from female spies to Charles I's killers Charles I’s trial lasted eight days in January 1649. During that time, Milton quickly put together the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, its title page boasting “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death”. On 30 January, the king was decapitated by a single axe blow and his head held up, blood dripping from the neck, to the cheering crowd. The monarchy and the House of Lords were swiftly abolished. Some years later, Cromwell became head of state, taking the (unmistakably regal) title of lord protector. Speaking in tongues Within six weeks of Charles I’s execution, Milton was called upon to serve the republican government in the role of secretary for foreign tongues. Tasked with translating official communications, largely from the period’s international language of Latin, Milton received a handsome annual salary of £288, 13 shillings and 6½d (around £45,000 today). Foreign governments were still wary of the new regime in Britain, so Milton’s talents were mainly channelled into writings in defence of the revolution. His Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), published in October 1649, attempted to justify the regicide. It was written in response to Eikon Basilike (The Royal Image), subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published shortly after the execution and purportedly written by the king himself before he died. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1288501833-86a56ff-e1731928903323.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Held in high regard by royalists, the title page of Eikon Basilike featured an allegorical image depicting Charles as a saintly martyr, engraved by William Marshall. That artist had earlier drawn Milton for his 1645 poetry collection – a depiction that the author hated. In retribution, Milton instructed Marshall to engrave a caption in Greek, describing the latter as “a rank beginner” and “a good-for-nothing artist” – barbs which, not speaking that language, he would have been unable to understand. Milton and Mary Powell had reconciled in 1645, but different problems soon arose. For one thing, the writer’s eyesight was weakening: by 1648, he’d lost all vision in one eye, and in 1652 he became permanently blind. In that same devastating year, Mary died from complications during the birth of their third daughter, Deborah. Milton’s second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock in 1656, appears to have been more amicable. Like his first wife, though, Katherine died in 1658 following childbirth. In one of his most emotive pieces, Milton writes about encountering his late beloved, whom he met only after losing his sight, during his vivid sleep: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” Perhaps tellingly, it was around this time that Milton – a blind man left to raise his three daughters alone – began to work on Paradise Lost. Despite the overthrow of the monarchy, on Oliver’s death in September 1658 the Cromwellian government reverted to dynastic succession. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as lord protector, but lacked the qualities that had prompted Milton to describe his father as “chief of men… Guided by faith and matchless fortitude”. Parliament soon retook control, much to Milton’s delight. Within a few months, however, the army had dissolved parliament – something that Milton condemned in no uncertain terms. As the royalists regained power, and with the restoration of the monarchy looking inevitable, Milton remained outspoken in opposition. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth proposed the formation of a permanent republican federation, or at the very least an elected sovereign. Yet such a scheme was, by 1660, hopelessly utopian. Writer on the run The monarchy was restored that May, when Charles II returned from exile and succeeded his father. Like his fellow republicans, Milton had to either run or hide. With an arrest warrant issued, and in real danger of assassination, he went into hiding. A proclamation was issued ordering that all of his books should be collected for burning, and Milton’s writings were consigned to the flames at the Old Bailey. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period Execution loomed, and many of his friends were put to death. A general pardon issued later in the summer of 1660 exempted Milton from suffering the same fate, but it didn’t mean that he was safe. By autumn, Milton had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. It’s not known why he was pardoned, around three months later; it may have been because of his visual impairment, or thanks to support from his friend Andrew Marvell, a poet who was also an influential MP. Still, Milton emerged from prison having lost many of his acquaintances, and in financial difficulty; he’d paid £150 – a large sum – to be released, and £2,000 of his savings had been seized. More detrimentally still, his dream of a republic – one in which he had believed, that he’d promoted and that had, for a short while, lived – had all but vanished. The Restoration complete, plague arrived to ravage England, driving Milton to take refuge in Buckinghamshire in July 1665. When that epidemic abated, he made his way back to London early the following year – only to be met by another disaster: the Great Fire of London. Though his house survived, the majority of his city was razed. Milton had spent the first half of the 1660s focusing on Paradise Lost, with an inevitably different outlook on life. “I now must change / Those notes to tragic,” laments the poem’s narrator. Milton was by then blind, lonely and essentially under house arrest, the powers he had challenged now restored: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.” Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London The well-read Milton alluded to the scriptures, poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace. The result is a dramatic, imaginative take on Satan’s rebellion against God, and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve. Set at the beginning of human history, it boasts an expansive setting, with Heaven at the top and Earth dangling from it, Hell at the bottom and a dark Chaos in between. Its story is one of ambition and rebellion, questioning the extent of free will and divine justice. Its characters – even God the Father and Son – are complicated and imperfect. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-463907993-5e42463-e1731929089161.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> And no Miltonic character is more famous than the deeply intense Satan, who rallies the fallen angels with populist rhetoric but also contemplates his condition with psychological rigour: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” It’s difficult not to read Milton’s politics into his great epic. In the preface, entitled ‘The Verse’, he explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers, he thought. By opposing rhyme and writing freely, Milton’s style was inherently nonconformist. Even more surprising is Satan’s often justified, if overambitious, opposition to the omnipotent but stubborn and out-of-touch God. It’s no surprise that this has long been interpreted as a metaphor for brave opposition against the seemingly immovable monarchy. In 1667, publisher Samuel Simmons paid Milton £5 for the rights to Paradise Lost; according to his contract, he received a further £5 once sales reached an agreed figure. In 1674, he republished the most authoritative version of Paradise Lost, in 12 books – like the classic epics with which he may have felt it was on a par. A few weeks later, Milton prepared his will, in which he mentioned the money still owed by his first wife’s father. He died in November that year. All is not lost It’s both intriguing and telling that Milton didn’t venture to North America. As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation. In an alternative universe, he might have been America’s greatest poet. Yet though Milton was a radical, he was also an idealist who stayed put, believing that he could change the system. Read more | "They decided that God must be leading them to North America": the Puritan journey to the Mayflower He had seen some of the world beyond England, travelling to Italy, Geneva and France in 1638. He appears to have had no trouble mastering Italian, claiming that it’s “easily learned at any odd hour”. It’s even said that Milton rolled his letter R when he spoke in Europe, in an effort to differentiate himself from other embarrassing compatriots on the continent. That trip had a formative effect on Milton, evident in Paradise Lost. When Satan ventures from Hell to Eden with the intention of taking down Adam and Eve, his shield, “massy, large and round… Hung on his shoulders like the moon”. Satan is essentially carrying his shield like a big backpack: it looks like the moon only if “through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” it. That artist was the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who’d championed the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. This view was officially deemed “foolish and absurd… formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of holy scripture”. By the time Milton met him, the Italian was elderly and blind. He had challenged authority but been forced to retract his beliefs, and was under house arrest – just as Milton was when writing Paradise Lost. No wonder Milton also challenged authority. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-600041375-c1a0392-e1731928957762.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Never to yield Yet there is much to suggest that a spark of idealism lived on. Adam, Eve and Satan seemingly all lose in Paradise Lost. But its ending sees the human couple locking hands as they step into a new world, free from Eden’s baggage – a world in which they can explore themselves and engage their free will. Even Satan, “in dubious battle… shook his (God’s) throne”. Here, Milton holds on to the thought that, for a short while, he played a part in shaking the establishment. “What though the field be lost?” Satan asks himself, before continuing to declare that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.” Milton’s influence on the English language is as profound as his views on politics and religion were radical. It’s claimed that he invented almost three times as many words as William Shakespeare did. Throughout his career, too, he conceived phrases, many of which speak to the enduring necessity of optimism. In his masque Comus, the character of the Lady spots a “cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”. And in the elegy Lycidas, Milton ends by confirming the temporary nature of grieving – that life must go on: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” John Milton’s artistic legacy In the 350 years since its creator’s death, Paradise Lost has inspired generations of painters, musicians and writers Painting and poetry Poet and painter William Blake quipped that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. The protagonist of Blake’s illustrated Milton: A Poem is that author, whose soul is re-embodied from Heaven. Describing blindness, the narrator of Paradise Lost mentions that a “cloud” of “ever-during dark Surrounds me”; in the first picture of his illustrated epic, Blake drew a naked Milton surrounded by darkness and clouds. In the 1800s, Blake also created a series of striking watercolour plates illustrating Paradise Lost. Sculpture Milton’s Satan is a complicated character with altered perceptions over the centuries. Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer is a towering and unsettling bronze statue completed during the Second World War. The figure’s asymmetry, suggestive stance and possible androgyny reflect Satan’s sexual tensions in Paradise Lost and the poem’s description of how “spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both”. Several decades earlier, Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver’s Fallen Angel portrayed Satan’s agonising fall from heaven – a move away from the stern and hypermasculine pre-Miltonic devil. Literature In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the creature discovers a book inside an abandoned bag: Paradise Lost. He assumes that it’s a true story, and compares himself to lonely Adam and mistreated Satan. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,” he reflects, “I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” More recently, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy drew heavily on the plot and themes of Paradise Lost. Its very title borrows the epic’s description of the mysterious elements that God employs during the act of creation. Landscape art A footpath in San Diego, California, takes the form of a beguiling serpent that turns Paradise Lost into a physical journey. Since 1992, artist Alexis Smith’s 170-metre-long Snake Path has invited individuals to walk through temptation, passing a small Edenic garden of fruit trees and a granite statue of an oversized book. It is carved with words from the finale of Paradise Lost, in which the angel Michael reminds Adam – and, in turn, readers – about the path to true bliss: “Then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far.” Stained glass During the 19th-century Gothic revival, Paradise Lost appeared in stained glass – a form that Milton described as “storied windows richly dight [ie adorned]”. The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888, includes portraits of Milton at various stages of his life: at school, visiting Galileo, dictating to his daughters. Its Paradise Lost scenes show Satan rousing the fallen angels in one panel and spying on Adam and Eve in another. Music Themes and images from Paradise Lost have influenced countless musicians over the decades, from a metal band of the same name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eminem. Lana Del Rey reimagined the epic story in her short film Tropico, with songs Body Electric, Gods and Monsters and Bel Air exploring the states of bliss, fall and redemption. It takes cues from Milton’s epic poem: there’s a “muttering thunder” when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, while at the end the first couple depart “hand in hand”. “It’s innocence lost,” sings Del Rey, “like Paradise, Paradise Lost.” This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
Runes – those instantly recognisable characters inscribed on stone, wood and bone – are filled with mystery, but can reveal little-known aspects of everyday Viking life. Eleanor Barraclough deciphers runes that recount tales of love, lust, travel and tragedy from a millennium ago
The Vikings are best known for their bloody raids, bawdy gods and buried ships. But they are also famous for the runes – the Nordic branch of the spiky north Germanic alphabet still so familiar today. Though Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, runes were the chief exception, lying at the intersection between text and object. In the same way that the word ‘alphabet’ is derived by combining the Greek letters ⍺ (alpha) and β (beta), the Nordic equivalent, ‘futhark’, is derived from the first six letters of the writing system: ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u), ᚦ (th), ᚬ (a), ᚱ (r), ᚴ (k). Surprisingly, because they represent such a recognisable and well-known form of ancient writing, no one knows for certain where runes came from. It’s probably no coincidence that many of the oldest interpretable runic inscriptions discovered – dating from the second century AD – were found in a context that shows evidence of contact with the Roman empire. The shape of runic characters are similar to many letters of the Latin alphabet, but with an angular shape more suited for carving into hard materials such as wood, bone and stone. It’s likely that knowledge of the Roman writing system travelled north with people who had spent time on both sides of the imperial frontier along the Rhine, whether as mercenaries, traders or craftspeople. Want to know more about the Vikings? Professor Ryan Lavelle leads our four-week HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course, available to HistoryExtra subscribers This might also explain one possible meaning of the word ‘rune’ itself: something secret or hidden, originally reserved for a particular segment of society – an elite group. As the centuries passed, though, knowledge and use of runes spanned an ever-broader proportion of society. The Viking Age is typically considered to encompass roughly the years 750–1100 AD – the period during which people of Scandinavian origins and heritage took part in overseas raiding, trading and settlement. At its height, the Norse diaspora they created stretched from Arctic Greenland in the west to the Eurasian waterways of the east. Listen | Neil Price takes us inside the Viking mind to explain how the Norse raiders viewed the world and what drove them to expand across the seas Designating dates for a ‘Viking Age’ is a useful way to situate ourselves in time. But runes remind us that any historical age rarely has neat edges to mark its beginning and end. Runes were used in the Norse world several centuries before the infamous international raids started, and their use continued for centuries afterwards. From the intimacies of daily life to the grand sweep of history, runes were used to record lives and deaths, preserving people’s names, their emotions, their humanity. Through them we come within touching distance of the people of the past, with their kaleidoscope of voices, experiences, emotions, relationships and beliefs. Here, we will see how deciphering runes allows us to catch glimpses of five key aspects of Norse culture, spanning the commemoration of death, love and lust, drinking, word games, and the realities of travel in the Viking Age world. Remembering a life Many runestones were carved to mark the passing of beloved individuals, recording details of their lives and travels The Norse inscriptions most familiar to us today are probably official runestones, typically commissioned to commemorate departed loved ones. If you’ve passed through Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, you might have walked straight past one such monument. Looming above the bustle of modern-day travellers, this incongruous lump of stone features the fading outline of two carved snakes arching round the edge and looping back on themselves. The bodies of the snakes are adorned with runes that translate as: Gunnar and Bjorn and Thorgrim raised this stone in memory of their brother Thorstein, who died in the east with Yngvar, and made this bridge. Read more | Test your knowledge of the Vikings with our ultimate quiz This runestone was originally erected in the mid-11th century alongside a road and the bridge mentioned in the inscription, where it could be admired by travellers passing along the busy route. Commissioning such a stone was an expensive act that not only commemorated Thorstein’s life but also immortalised his three brothers. The runestone mentions that Thorstein “died in the east with Yngvar”. In the region around Lake Mälaren, near Stockholm, are many other runestones that commemorate husbands, fathers, sons and brothers who, like Thorstein, went on that same eastern expedition – possibly in the direction of the Caspian Sea – and never returned. Some of these runestones still stand where they were erected. Others have been built into the walls of churches and cathedrals. In all, some 20 names survive on various stones: Thorstein, Gunnleif, Harald, Saebjorn, Baggi, Gunnvid, Ulf, Gauti, Belgir, Hrodgeir, Tosti, Hugi, Thorbjorn, Skarf, Skardi, Bjorstein, Osnikin, Orm, Onun and, of course, Yngvar himself. Each runestone is a public testament to private family loss, grief and pride. Love letters Norse people recorded romantic passions and secret desires in runes Many runic inscriptions from the Norse world were not meant for public consumption. Rather, they were the equivalent of the scrappy sticky notes, every day text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time. Written on wood, metal, bone and stone, a number of the surviving messages record strong emotions: loves, lusts, rejections. Some express fluffy sentiments of the sort that might appear in a packet of Love Hearts or on Valentine’s Day cards: “Think of me, I think of you! Love me, I love you!” Read more | How to write a love letter: 6 tips from the historical figures who did it best Others provide the names of the ones doing the loving and the lusting. Runes on a piece of cow bone from Oslo read: “Asa loves St____”, with the latter word broken off after the first two characters. Asa is a woman’s name, and St____ is likely the fractured remains of a man’s name: Stein or Stefan, perhaps. In this case, Asa’s feelings don’t seem to be much of a secret, because the final runes on the bone spell out the word ek uæit – “I know.” Other runic inscriptions hint at the sort of messy gossip that goes hand in hand with the human condition but which rarely survives for posterity: hints of same-sex acts, affairs, indiscretions and one-night stands. One carver tells us: “The clever woman lets loose for her lover, but folk still think she’s a virgin.” Another remembers the good times: “Ingibjorg loved me when I was in Stavanger.” Another spills the beans: “Clumsy-Kari and Vilhjalm’s wife are shacked up together.” Some tell of people who have been unhappily friend-zoned: “I love another man’s wife so much that fire seems cold to me, and I am a friend of this woman.” Others hint at rejection or love affairs gone sour. One such, a 10th-century square weaving tablet made from bone, found in Lund (then in Denmark, now in Sweden), provides two out of three names in what appears to be a love triangle: Sigvor (female) and Ingimarr (male). The unnamed carver of the runes is most likely female, and the runes appear to form a curse, directed particularly at Ingimarr: the translatable part reads “Sigvor’s Ingimarr will have my weeping!” There are examples of runic messages that were hidden in Norwegian stave churches, which tell us that private passions burned in these holy houses. A wooden runestick found in Urnes stave church at Sogn og Fjordane in south central Norway declares: “Arni the priest wants to have Inga.” Whether this was a confession by Arni himself or a scurrilous rumour started by a member of the congregation, we can’t know. Another stick, found in Lom stave church in the same part of Norway, was inscribed by a man called Havard to woman identified only by the first letters of her name, possibly Gudny or Gunnhild. He is proposing marriage – but it seems that he’s not her only option, because “it is my full desire to ask for you” is followed by “…if you don’t want to be with Kolbein”. Someone has attempted to conceal the identities of the people involved by scratching out the three names in this potential love triangle and dropping the wooden runestick surreptitiously between the church’s floorboards. Gudny/Gunnhild herself is a possible culprit – the wooden stick was found in the area of the church where women sat for mass – but we can only guess at the emotions that were going through their head at the time. Booze-fuelled banter Runes were used to summon errant husbands and make crude jokes The biggest haul of everyday runic inscriptions was found at the medieval harbourside of Bryggen in Bergen, Norway. There were nearly 700 at latest count, most inscribed on little sticks discovered by archaeologists after some of the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in the 1950s. One, etched by a woman named Gyda around AD 1200, reads ᚵᛦᛆ:ᛍᛅᚼᛁᚱ:ᛆᛐᚦᚢ:ᚴᛆᚴᚼᛅᛁᛘ – transliterated into Roman letters as gya : sæhir : at þu : kak hæim. In English, that roughly translates as: “Gyda says that you should go home.”. Judging from where the stick was found, it seems likely that Gyda sent the message to her husband down at the tavern, telling him to finish up his drink and come home. On the other side of the stick are a flurry of indecipherable runes – perhaps a reply to Gyda carved by a husband too drunk to hold his knife steady. Other runic inscriptions found in Bergen also bear the hallmarks of inebriation. One carved into a wooden handle reads: “If only I might come nearer to the mead-house much more often.” Elsewhere, a cow bone was scored with runes that proclaim: “Now there’s going to be a fight,” followed by an undecipherable reply in another hand – perhaps scratched by a couple of drinkers about to witness a noisy punch-up, one of them too inebriated to carve a coherent sentence. Such inscriptions tell us that medieval Scandinavians could be as immature as the rest of us. We can almost hear sniggering across the centuries as someone takes up their knife to carve: “Sit down and interpret the runes, stand up and fart.” And from toilet-based humour it’s only ever a hop, skip and jump to genital-based jokes. One line of alliterative poetry carved onto a length of wood might be translated as: “The vagina is lovely, may the penis serve it a drink.” Like all groundbreaking forms of technology, humans found a way to make it about bums and boobs. Playing with words Norse people enjoyed composing poetry and inventing linguistic games to help pass the time Wordplay, poems and brain teasers were beloved by people across all strata of Norse society. It’s relatively rare to find evidence of these preserved in runes because such verbal games were predominantly oral rather than written. But some surviving runes reveal the diverse ways those living across the Norse world amused themselves. One runestick dating from c985–1025 AD in the earliest decades of the settlement in Greenland tells us something about the sort of wordplay enjoyed by those who lived in the farthest-flung Norse communities. The stick involved is a four-sided piece of pinewood around 43cm long, with a natural knot at one end that resembles a birdlike creature. Read more | Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world It was discovered in 1953 by someone from the town of Narsaq who, while foraging for good-quality mud and soil for gardening, found themselves digging in what had been the living room of one of the earliest Norse farms. Runes are inscribed on four sides of the stick. On one side, transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the runes read: o : sa : sa : sa : is : o sa : sat. Several interpretations of these runes have been suggested, with variations along the lines of “On a tub saw the person, who sat on a tub,” or “On the sea that seemed to be, which you did not see on the sea.” Whatever the correct interpretation – and perhaps there was never meant to be just one – this is a fascinating example of word play using homonyms: words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings. There are many examples of this in modern Nordic languages, one being the Icelandic sentence Afi á Á á á á á: “Grandpa from Á [a place] has a sheep by a river.” Travel diaries Items carved with runes provide evidence of the travels of Norse folk during the Viking Age The previous example of runic wordplay from Norse Greenland, with its allusions to the sea, reminds us that this was a culture predicated on travel, both on land and on water. Other little scraps of runic inscriptions occasionally provide the names of ordinary individuals who travelled extraordinary distances, sometimes under extraordinary circumstances. One of these inscriptions was found in a wooden coffin in the Norse graveyard of Herjolfsnes, close to the southernmost tip of Greenland. The coffin contained no body, only a wooden stick carved with runes that read: “This woman, who was called Gudveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.” She died on the voyage west, it seems, so this was as close to a burial as she could be given. Read more | Global Vikings: how the impact of the raiders and traders went far beyond Britain Another example was discovered near the high pass of Lendbreen, in the mountains of south central Norway. This pass lay on an ancient highway – a track along which farming families moved up to and down from their summer pastures, as well as a route used by traders and long-distance travellers bound for other parts of the country and even across the sea. As climate change bites, glacial archaeologists are racing to recover ephemera that were preserved here in ice for the past millennium. An extraordinary range of artefacts has been discovered, including farming equipment, a woollen mitten, a lot of frozen horse poo – and a relic revealing the name of at least one of the travellers who used this route during the Viking Age. Carved onto a wooden walking stick around AD 1000 are runes that read: “Ivar owns this.” Wherever Ivar was heading, he had to reach his destination unaided by his stick – which lay frozen in ice for the next thousand years. Eleanor Barraclough is a broadcaster, writer and historian based at Bath Spa University, and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024) This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Robert Burns: 7 facts about the life and work of Scotland's national bard
Famed as Scotland's national bard, Robert Burns (1759–96) penned many famous verses including 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Address to a Haggis'. His life and work are celebrated by many Scots on Burns Night, 25 January, on the anniversary of the poet's work. Dr Ronnie Young, senior lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, shares seven lesser-known facts about the Scottish hero…
Who was Robert Burns? Robert Burns, famed as Scotland’s national bard or the ploughman poet, is renowned for verses such as ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Address to a Haggis’, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. However, the popular perception of Burns can mask a complex and at times contradictory character with a rich and varied legacy of poems and songs, from the tender and sentimental to the cuttingly satirical and politically radical. Here, we take a brief look at some lesser-known facts about the man and his work… The myth of the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ A number of myths surround Robert Burns. One of the most enduring of these is the idea of the "heaven-taught ploughman". This phrase was first coined in 1786, in an early review of Burns’s poetry by Henry Mackenzie, one of the leading critics in Edinburgh at that time. Such gentlemen critics viewed Burns as an "original genius" and prodigy due to his humble status, rural background and supposed ‘lack’ of formal education. While Burns himself often played up to this image of the "simple bard / unbroke by rules of art", he was in fact a highly well-read and cultivated individual. The young Burns was schooled by a private tutor, John Murdoch, who had been hired by Burns’s father. Despite occasional claims to possess little learning, Burns elsewhere parades his education; in a famous letter to author and travel writer Dr John Moore of August 1787, for example, he displays a strong familiarity with literary greats such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke, Alexander Pope and Tobias Smollett. He also left an extensive library when he died. Read more | St Andrew’s Day: 11 things you might not know about Scotland’s patron saint Another myth that grew up around Burns was his reputed fondness for drink. We know that Burns was a convivial character, as celebrated frequently in his poems and songs. However, in the wake of his death in 1796, biographers began to exaggerate Burns’s ‘intemperance’. In 1797, a memoir by the journalist Robert Heron made inflated claims about Burns’s supposed moral dissipation, while the editor of the influential and highly successful first collected works of the poet, James Currie, attributed Burns’s death to alcoholism. These myths may reflect the biographers’ sympathies more than those of their subject: Heron was prone to dissipation himself; Currie was a physician and teetotaller. One ‘myth’ that may have more of a foundation in fact is Burns’ famed weakness for the opposite sex. Burns fathered some 13 children to at least five different women. The majority of these children were born out of wedlock, although some were legitimised when Burns finally made Jean Armour his wife. His famous affair with Agnes McLehose, or ‘Clarinda’, produced a renowned series of love letters as well as one of the finest love songs ever written, ‘Ae Fond Kiss’. However, in this case his love didn’t stop him from seducing McLehose’s maid, Jenny Clow, who had a child to the poet in 1788. Poet or songwriter? Burns is known the world over as a leading poet, yet much of his prodigious output consisted of songs. Burns lived a short yet productive life, squeezing much of his major work into a mere decade, from the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in Kilmarnock in 1786 to his death in Dumfries 10 years later. Much of this energy, particularly towards the latter end of his career, was spent collecting, reworking, and writing new lyrics for existing songs. Indeed, Burns was one of the leading songsmiths of his day with an output to rival Lennon and McCartney (although he didn’t actually write the music). Burns was the main contributor to editor James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, a leading collection of Scots songs from the period. Read more | Scotland's cry for liberty: the Declaration of Arbroath He also worked with editor George Thomson, who produced the more ‘polished’ multi-volume A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, which even included arrangements by celebrated contemporary European composers such as Hadyn and Beethoven. While we might think of Burns’s songs as ‘folk music’ and, while they often celebrate ‘ordinary’ life, these songs would have been consumed by, and played in the homes of, polite middle-class audiences. The resulting performances would have been very different to those recordings of Burns we are familiar with today. ‘Scots Wha Hae’ A number of Burns’s most famous songs have existed in different versions at one stage or another. Some of Burns’s songs would also have sounded different in his own day not simply because of the manner and context in which they were performed, but because they were linked with different tunes at different times. The lyrics Burns wrote for his rousing patriotic anthem ‘Scots Wha Hae’, for example, were originally set to the tune of a drinking song, ‘Hey Tutti Tatie’, and indeed this is the tune with which we associate the song today. However, George Thomson, an editor known to interfere and ‘polish’ Burns’s work, selected what he thought was a more appropriate song, ‘Lewie Gordon’, for the initial publication of ‘Scots Wha Hae’, forcing the poet to add extra syllables to the final line of each verse. It wasn’t until much later on that Thomson had a change of heart and published the song with Burns’s original choice of tune. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ There are numerous different versions of perennial New Year favourite ‘Auld Lang Syne’ too. In the 18th century there were two melodies associated with the song, only one of which is the version we sing at New Year. This familiar version is a much played and much covered tune, but not one that has always been inextricably linked with Burns’ lyrics nor with New Year celebrations. It has acted in the past as the national anthem of Korea and the Maldives, and is the tune for a graduation song in Japan, ‘Hotaru no Hikari’, also used to signal closing time in some Japanese stores. As well as being an integral part of Burns Suppers, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was a favourite of Union forces in the American Civil War and was also sung by troops in the First World War during the famous Christmas truce of 1914. Although we might expect that the association of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the turning of the year is tied to the importance of ‘Hogmanay’ in Scottish culture, its festive associations have undoubtedly been driven by US popular culture in the 20th century. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was a favourite part of the New Year repertoire of the Guy Lombardo band in New York, and a seminal recording of their version became the soundtrack to the ‘dropping of the ball’ in Times Square. The status of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the anthem for New Year has been further boosted by numerous cover versions, including artists as diverse as Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, BB King, The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, and Mariah Carey, not to mention key celluloid moments from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to When Harry Met Sally (1989). Burns was not actually the first Scottish poet to write a version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A keen collector of Scottish songs who often reworked existing works, Burns built upon earlier versions of the poem, which included a version ascribed to Sir Robert Aytoun and another to Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay. Burns retains little from his predecessors other than the famous opening line "Should auld acquaintance be forgot", instead updating the song for the modern age and a new era of travel. Its central toast to and remembrance of parted friends and loved ones has since made it a particularly appropriate song with which to celebrate the new year. The ‘patriot bard’ Burns is celebrated as Scotland’s national bard, and the ‘cult of Burns’ is an integral part of Scottish cultural identity. Inspired by 18th-century poets Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns became the leading voice in the ‘Vernacular Revival’ of Scots language poetry in post-Union Scotland. He was also one of main collector and editors of traditional Scottish music. As a self-professed patriot and ‘sentimental Jacobite’, Burns venerated national heroes such as Robert the Bruce, William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie. We can also see a central part played by Burns in the ‘invention’ of Scottish national identity in the Romantic period and beyond, from the ‘romanticisation’ of the Highlands (which he toured in 1787) through to the making of national symbols out of whisky and haggis. Read more | Walter Scott: the man who invented Scotland It is perhaps for such reasons that Burns has been appropriated as a leading icon of the tartan tourist industry. However, his iconic status as ‘alpha Scot’ may conceal a more nuanced Scottishness. Burns wrote and spoke very well in English, the language of his schooling and of the Presbyterian religion in which he was raised. He composed cultivated letters on the model of the finest examples Augustan prose, and his favourite authors included English authors such as Joseph Addison and William Shenstone as well as ‘Anglo-Scots’ James Thomson and James Beattie. The patriot bard sang about and against such things as the Union of 1707 and the deposed Stewart monarchy, but he also wrote the ‘pro-British’ song ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’, named after the volunteer regiment in which he served as part of a wider British response to the threat of French invasion in the 1790s. Read more | Scotland on the brink: the nation’s final years of independence Burns the radical, the socialist, the nationalist, the…? The poet and critic Edwin Muir (1887–1959) once remarked that Burns is "to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious". Such mixed messages as people find in Burns’s writing have encouraged different groups to attempt to appropriate him for different cultural and political purposes, including recruitment into the British Army during the First World War through to the referendum for Scottish Independence in 2014, in which both sides claimed that Burns would have voted for their side if he were still alive. Read more | 5 influential WW1 poets you should know about We may ask which way Burns would have voted were he around today, but we often forget that political life was very different in the poet’s own day, that party politics was not as ideologically polarised as today, and that Burns would not even have been entitled to vote in what was still a pre-democratic country. Alas, we may never know how Burns would have felt about Brexit. Burns’s own political views are difficult to unpick, although he has been frequently appropriated for progressive politics, even to the extent of being hailed a proto-socialist or celebrated in such places as the former Soviet Union. We divine progressive values in his celebration of ordinary life and his satire of social hierarchy, as exemplified in the radical anthem ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. Read more | Flodden 1513: the biggest ever Anglo-Scottish battle An early version of this song appeared in the short-lived radical Glasgow Magazine of 1795, when the mood for political reform was high, and the repressive measures enacted against ‘sedition’ excessive. Though a friend to reform, Burns published his sentiments anonymously: as an exciseman and therefore a government employee, he had to maintain an outward show of loyalty to King George. ‘A Man’s a Man’ was later sung at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, showing how a song that challenged the political establishment of his own day could be appropriated to speak for the political establishment of another time. The bawdy bard A number of Burns’s poems and songs were suppressed during his lifetime, and not just for their political content. These include songs on more risqué topics. Burns wrote a considerable number of ‘bawdy’ or obscene verses which were not published while he was alive, and which had a less than straightforward route to publication. Earlier editors such as James Currie, for example, tried to distance the poet from his pornographic poems, while obscenity laws (which were not relaxed until the late-20th century) prevented their widespread publication. Even though standards may be relatively lax today, Burns’s bawdy poems still have the power to shock with their explicit language and frank description of sex. One important collection of the bard’s bawdry was The Merry Muses of Caledonia, penned by the poet for the Crochallan Fencibles, a male drinking club to which Burns belonged and which met at a tavern in Anchor Close in Edinburgh. Containing titles such as ‘The Fornicator’ and ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’, The Merry Muses was not published in Burns’s lifetime and for a long time only appeared in privately published volumes to be circulated among a "discreet" male audience. Burns’ reputation Although most closely associated with Scotland (and even the stereotypical trappings of Scottish identity), Burns’s reputation is international. There are statues of Burns all over the world, in places as far afield as North America and New Zealand. His likeness has appeared on bank notes, postage stamps, and Coca Cola bottles, and an edition of his poems has even been sent into space. Burns has had many admirers, from other poets and writers through to world leaders. For example, US president Abraham Lincoln was a big fan of Burns and could recite lines of his poems by heart. He has had many poetic imitators, while novels have been named after his work, most famously the modern American classics Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck, which takes its title from ‘To a Mouse’, and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), after a line in ‘Comin thro the Rye’. Facts courtesy of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Many of the ideas presented here are explored further in the online courses run by the Centre and in their AHRC-funded research project Editing Robert Burns for the 21st century This article was first published by HistoryExtra in January 2017
The poetry and protest of Siegfried Sassoon
He is remembered as one of the greatest poets of his generation. But what drove Siegfried Sassoon to decry the horrors of World War I so publicly, even when he risked facing the wrath of his own side?
Before Britain had declared its involvement in the First World War , Siegfried Loraine Sassoon had signed up. He would later allude to “serious aspirations to heroism” that took him from his life of a country gentleman in Kent – where he had been born on 8 September 1886, grown up in a wealthy family, and spent his twenties enjoying fox hunting, cricket and writing poetry – to the battlefield in the name of king and country. Sassoon kept writing as a soldier: his verse befitting the jingoistic and glory-fuelled works of many poets at the start of war, like Rupert Brooke. Q&A | How old was the youngest known soldier to fight in WW1? “War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free,” reads his 1915 poem, Absolution. And serving on the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Lieutenant Sassoon distinguished himself. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions during a raid on a German trench, where he stayed for 90 minutes under fire to assist the wounded and dying. Such was his fearlessness – he once captured a section of enemy trench singlehandedly – that his men nicknamed him ‘Mad Jack’. Siegfried Sassoon's war poems Sassoon was, for all intents and purposes, a good soldier, but he would become a vocal opponent to the war. In 1915, his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli campaign and his poetry grew angry, bitter and acerbic. He depicted the suffering in the trenches and hospitals while satirising and condemning the military leaders who sent tens of thousands to their deaths. One of his 1917 poems starts with a general cheerily greeting troops on their way to Arras with a “Good-morning, good-morning!” before matter-of-factly being followed with the lines: “Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead / And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine”. Read more | Five WW1 poets you should know about Shortly after writing The General – one of the dozens of anti-war poems he penned, making him a well-known figure back in Britain – Sassoon was wounded and sent to England to recover. He got to know several prominent pacifists, including the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and came to the decision that he must protest the continuation of the war. And that he would do so publicly with an open letter to his commanding officer. “I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority,” began the missive, dated 15 June 1917. It went on to describe the purposes of the war as “evil and unjust”, the soldiers as victims of “deception”, and voiced the desire that his protest may help to “destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise”. Read more | How WW1 soldiers found hope in nature Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen's relationship Sassoon’s declaration risked a court martial, even execution, especially after being read out in the House of Commons and printed in newspapers. The military authorities instead hoped to discredit Sassoon by making out that he had gone mad as a result of neurasthenia, or shell shock, and sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, for psychiatric care. While there, Sassoon witnessed the traumatic effects of shell shock and its often-brutal methods of treatment, and wrote prolifically (completing some of his best poems, such as Does it Matter? and Counter-Attack). It was his friendship with a patient that had the greater impact, however, for it was at Craiglockhart that he met and greatly influenced Wilfred Owen. The younger officer was a keen fan and his own style developed dramatically thanks to Sassoon’s guidance and encouragement, leading to iconic poems like Dulce et Decorum Est, Insensibility and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Before the year was out, both men had rejoined their regiments. The months at Craiglockhart had quelled Sassoon’s protest and he chose to return to active service and not abandon his men. Yet, even then, his voice could not be silenced, as Sassoon published his poems in two collections entitled The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Siegfried Sassoon after the First World War Sassoon survived the war, although barely, as he picked up a head wound when shot by a fellow British soldier who mistook him for a German. Owen was not so lucky, dying just a week before the Armistice. Read more | Where was the Armistice signed? Sassoon went on to have a long and varied career, including as a newspaper’s literary editor and a public speaker, before his death, at the age of 80, in 1967. For the rest of his life, his writing regularly returned to the horrors of warfare, notably in a critically acclaimed three-volume semi-autobiography. Sassoon’s angry, passionate and scathingly honest words deepened every generations’ understanding of the utter horror and despair of the First World War, or, as he calls it in his 1918 poem Suicide in the Trenches, “The hell where youth and laughter go”. Read next | What was life like for First World War soliders after the Armistice?
5 influential WW1 poets you should know about
From scathing verses on the horrors of life in the trenches to laments on the tragedy of a lost generation, the First World War inspired some of British poetry's most poignant and affecting work. Here, Ellie Cawthorne highlights five influential British writers whose lives and work were shaped by the conflict…
Learn more about five influential British poets whose lives and work were shaped by the First World War… Hedd Wyn In the autumn of 1917, far from the front lines of France, large crowds gathered in Birkenhead for the Welsh National Eisteddfod. A central part of the cultural festival was a poetry competition, in which poets submitted work under pseudonyms with the hope of winning a prestigious ceremonial ‘bardic chair’. However, war cast its long shadow over the festival that year. When the pseudonym of winning poet was announced at the awards ceremony, trumpets sounded and applause ensued. Yet no one stepped forward to claim the prize. It was revealed that the winner – a young poet known by the bardic name Hedd Wyn (meaning ‘blessed peace’) – had been killed in battle just six weeks earlier. As the bardic chair was swathed in black cloth, the shockwaves were palpable. “No words can adequately describe the wave of emotion that swept over the vast audience when Wyn’s bardic chair was draped with the symbols of mourning," one newspaper reported. Wyn’s absence that day was emblematic of a lost generation of men who would never return home. Read more | 10 First World War slang words we still use today Hedd Wyn, whose real name was Ellis Humphrey Evans, had been raised on a sheep farm in Gwynedd, north Wales. By the time he enlisted with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he was already a well-respected Welsh-language poet. Despite his relatively young age, Wyn had already won five other bardic chairs. However, his promising talent was cut short. Soon after arriving on the western front in June 1917, he was killed in one of the opening attacks of the battle of Passchendaele, on 31 July 1917. Wyn had begun his award-winning poem Yr Arwr, or ‘The Hero’, after enlisting, finishing it on the front lines. Shortly before his death, he had also composed another of his most famous poems, War (originally written in the Welsh language): Why was I born into this age In which mankind has exiled God? With God departed Man, with rage, now sits upon the throne of God. And when man knew that God had gone, To spill his brother's blood he bore His eager sword, and cast upon Our homes the shadow of the war. The harps to which we sang are hung On willow boughs, and their refrain Drowned by the anguish of the young Whose blood is mingled with the rain The bardic chair that Wyn was never able to claim in 1917 was afterwards known as Y Gadair Ddu or ‘The Black Chair’. It has been preserved at Wyn’s family home, now a museum, as a poignant reminder of those Wales lost in the war. Siegfried Sassoon A model soldier turned passionate pacifist, Siegfried Sassoon is remembered for his incendiary antiwar writing, which reflects shattered illusions about the glory and honour of warfare. After enlisting as a second lieutenant in May 1915, Sassoon soon gained an exemplary military record. He was decorated twice, awarded the Military Cross for rescuing comrades during a raid on an enemy trench. However, this bravery was also tinged with a disturbingly wild recklessness, which saw Sassoon termed “Mad Jack” by his comrades. As he experienced the horrors of trench warfare and witnessed the deaths of loved ones – including his brother Hamo at Gallipoli – Sassoon became increasingly disillusioned with the war. His poetry reflected this; where once it had been romantic, it grew increasingly harsh, mocking and cynical. Read more | How WW1 soldiers found hope in nature In April 1917, the poet’s growing antagonism toward Britain’s military commanders came to a head. Wounded in the shoulder, Sassoon lay recuperating in a military hospital bed. It was during this time away from the trenches that he constructed one of his most scathing indictments of the ineptitude of the military top brass – a poem called The General: “Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. “He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack. The caustic black humour of The General did not go down well with Sassoon’s superiors. The poet made matters worse by refusing to return to the front line and publishing an uncompromising letter in The Times arguing: “The war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.” Such provocative actions brought Sassoon dangerously close to being court-martialled. However, the army was reluctant to publically punish a well-known solider with such an impressive military record. Instead, they sent Sassoon to Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart hospital to be treated for shell shock. It was here that Sassoon began a fruitful creative relationship with fellow soldier-poet Wilfred Owen; he would become a profound influence on Owen’s work. After further postings in Palestine and France, Sassoon survived the war. He went on to a successful career writing both poetry and prose, and died in 1967. His experiences during the First World War proved a lasting influence on his work. Rupert Brooke Rupert Brooke has often been seen as a poster-boy for the idealism of Britain’s early war effort. Unlike poets such as Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, whose poetry was coloured by the mud and blood of the trenches, Brooke never lived to experience the horrors of front line service first hand. Consequently, his writing is characterised by a patriotism and romanticism which is completely at odds with the poetry that emerged from the later years of the war. Once described as the “handsomest young man in England”, Brooke was a well-connected socialite and member of the Bloomsbury Group. By the time that war broke out in Europe, he had already carved a reputation for himself as a poet. Like many of his peers, the well-travelled Cambridge graduate signed up to fight soon after the declaration of war. He was commissioned as a Royal Navy officer with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. While on Christmas leave in 1914, Brooke constructed his most well-known war poem, The Soldier. Part of a series of five war sonnets, it begins: If I should die, think only this of me That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed The patriotism and sentimentality of The Soldier proved astoundingly popular in Britain. However, Brooke’s poem was soon given a new and tragic poignancy. On 26 April 1915, just three weeks after The Times published Brooke’s poem, the same newspaper now printed his obituary. Read more | “There was no feeling sorry for themselves”: director Peter Jackson on the soldiers of the First World War Brooke had died at sea three days earlier, after contracting septicemia from an infected mosquito bite. He was aged 27. The poet’s friend William Denis Browne was at his deathbed, later recalling how he “died with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.” Wilfred Owen Despite writing some of the most iconic poetry of the First World War, Wilfred Owen never lived to see most of it published. After enlisting in 1915, Owen was sent to the western front in January 1917, where he was quickly exposed to the grim reality of life on the front line. In April, he wrote to his mother: “For 12 days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For 12 days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.” Following this particularly gruelling stretch in the trenches, Owen began to suffer from crippling headaches. He was diagnosed with shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart hospital to recuperate. Owen’s time at Craiglockhart had a lasting impact on him, both personally and creatively. By chance, the aspiring poet was hospitalised at the same time as one of his idols – Siegfried Sassoon. Although Owen wrote to his mother: “I am not worthy to light his [Sassoon’s] pipe”, the two poets soon developed a close bond. Owen later described Sassoon as the “greatest friend I have”. The pair exchanged ideas about poetry and Sassoon’s creative advice – and bitter cynicism about the war – undoubtedly galvanized Owen’s writing. In a letter, he recalled the older poet telling him: “Sweat your guts out writing poetry! Sweat your guts out, I say!” Read more | Remembering the battle of Amiens In the 14 months following his meeting with Sassoon in August 1917, Owen experienced a remarkable streak of creativity. The poems he composed during this time evoked his hideous first-hand experience of life in the trenches. The Sentry was inspired by the blinding of a comrade, while the ironically named Dulce et Decorum est (meaning “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”) was inspired by a gas attack Owen had witnessed in January 1917: Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, hit by machine gun fire while attempting to cross the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France. News of his death reached his parents on Armistice Day. He was just 25. Read more | Where was the Armistice signed? At the time of his death, Owen’s work was pretty much unknown – only five of his poems had been published during his lifetime. However, Sassoon desperately wanted to prevent his friend’s poignant poetry from being forgotten. In 1920, he edited and published a posthumous volume of Owen’s work, including poems such as Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth, which continue to shape how we how reflect on trench warfare to this day. Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling is not widely remembered as a First World War poet, but rather a jingoistic patriot who trumpeted Britain’s imperial conflicts. However, the war undoubtedly had an irrevocable effect on his writing and a devastating effect on his own life. When war broke out in 1914, Kipling – in his late 40s – was too old to enlist. Nevertheless, he used his writing to fuel Britain’s propaganda machine. He crafted idealistic images of the British armed forces, and is even credited with coining the term “the Hun” to demonise the German enemy. Kipling’s jingoistic writing proved immensely popular, especially with soldiers who took his verses with them to the front lines. Although Kipling was excluded from fighting, he was adamant that his only son John (known as Jack) should play his part in the war effort. Despite the fact that John was twice prevented from joining the navy due to shortsightedness, Kipling used his connections to secure his son an infantry commission. Read more | 5 tanks that changed the course of the First World War These actions soon came back to haunt Kipling. Aged just 18, John went missing in action during heavy machine gun fire in battle of Loos in 1915. Despite launching an extensive search on the slim hope that John could have been captured, Kipling never managed to recover his son’s body or uncover what had happened to him. John’s disappearance shattered his father’s gung-ho attitude towards war. Kipling vented his anger at the “idle-minded overlings” running proceedings, while his Epitaphs of War tellingly reads: "If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied." Following his son’s disappearance, Kipling wrote the heart-wrenching poem My Boy Jack. Although the poem was framed as a response to death of 16-year-old sailor Jack Cornwell, many viewed it as referring to Kipling’s own lost son: "HAVE you news of my boy Jack? " Not this tide. "When d'you think that he'll come back?" Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. "Has any one else had word of him?" Not this tide. For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. "Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?" None this tide, Nor any tide, Except he did not shame his kind Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2017
7 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Oscar Wilde
The Anglo-Irish Victorian playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was the toast of 1890s London, famous for his society plays and flamboyant wit, as well as his support of aestheticism. He later became known for his affairs with men and, after two hugely public and damaging trials, Wilde was in 1895 convicted of 'gross indecency' – a charge which criminalised homosexual people that no longer exists in the UK – and sentenced to two years' imprisonment
The final three years of Oscar Wilde's life were spent in exile in France and Italy, suffering abuse and humiliation, before he died impoverished in a Paris hotel. Here, we bring you seven surprising facts about Oscar Wilde… He was a proud Irishman Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a respected eye and ear doctor who revolutionised the treatment of ear infections (and also gained an unfortunate reputation for womanising; before his marriage he was the father of three children by two different women out of wedlock). Oscar’s mother was Jane Elgee, an Anglo-Irish revolutionary poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza. Growing up, Wilde was influenced by both his mother’s Irish nationalist politics and his father’s philanthropic tendencies. He was schooled at their family home in Merrion Square before going on to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and later attending Trinity College, Dublin, where he was introduced to the Greek literature that would greatly influence his later works and beliefs. Wilde’s Anglo-Irish background is often forgotten – perhaps because of his quintessentially ‘British’ writings – though he himself was proud of his Irish heritage. When an 1892 production of his provocative play Salomé was banned from the London stage, ostensibly due to its portrayal of biblical figures, Wilde is known to have remarked on the small-mindedness of the English censors, saying: "I am not English; I'm Irish which is quite another thing." He believed in ‘art for art’s sake’ While at Trinity, and later at the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College (which he attended between 1874 to 1878), Wilde was known for his support of aestheticism – an intellectual movement which centred on the idea that art should not exist for any other motive other than beauty. Drawing on the work of 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, aesthetes baulked against the Victorian idea that art could be a tool for social education and moral enlightenment. They believed that any morality or utility that a work might bring to an audience was irrelevant. Rupert Everett on Oscar Wilde’s life in exile Pride and prejudice: same-sex relations through history During his time in Oxford, Wilde fully embraced ‘aesthetic flair’: growing his hair long; dressing in flamboyant fashions and assuming exaggerated affectations. He famously once declared, when entertaining friends in his Oxford rooms: “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!” When aestheticism was satirised in Patience (1881), a popular comic opera by creative duo Gilbert and Sullivan, Wilde was called upon by opportunistic businessman Richard D'Oyly Carte to give a series of lectures defining and defending the movement. Wilde delivered lectures across North America throughout 1882, to huge success. Wilde became an icon of the aestheticism movement and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), is regarded as a great example of aesthetic theory and the interplay between art and morality. He wrote children’s stories Oscar Wilde is most famous for his acclaimed society plays – including Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893); and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Using sharp and witty comedy to frame a more serious commentary of Britain’s class hierarchy and human nature, Wilde’s plays were hugely popular when they premiered in 1890s London. Wilde became the toast of society, known for his flamboyant manner and frequent socialising at fashionable and exclusive venues such as the Café Royal. However, it is often forgotten that Wilde also wrote children’s stories. The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a collection of short fairy tales published in 1888. The best-known story in the collection is that of a gilded statue which, befriended by a migrating swallow, attempts to help the poor and miserable of its town. Wilde’s work is best remembered for being full of wry observances and prolific wit. Though there are many examples of witticisms incorrectly attributed to the playwright, among his more famous quotes are: “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is”; “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much”; and “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Touring London with Shakespeare, Dickens and Oscar Wilde: 7 must-see literary landmarks Are these the most overrated people in history? He was in love with Bram Stoker’s wife Wilde is remembered for his relationships with men [he fell from public regard after his infamous trial and conviction for ‘gross indecency’ and subsequent imprisonment between 1895 and 1897], but he also had several notable relationships with women. During his youth in Dublin, Wilde had been infatuated with the beautiful and witty Florence Balcombe. Eleanor Fitzsimons writes in Wilde's Women (2017) how Wilde gushed to a friend about Balcombe: “I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money. I will show you her photograph when I see you next.” To Wilde’s disappointment and despite their courtship, Balcombe instead chose to marry fellow Irish author Bram Stoker, who would later gain fame as the creator of Dracula. Fitzsimons notes that although Wilde was crushed, he went on to propose marriage to two further women before he met Constance Lloyd, the woman who would become his wife. Wilde was introduced to Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish barrister, in 1881. They married in 1884 and had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Many of their letters demonstrate a deep affection: "As long as I live you shall be my lover," Lloyd wrote in answer to Wilde’s proposal in 1883. Around the time of the birth of the couple’s second child in 1886, Wilde met 17-year-old Robbie Ross, a Canadian journalist and art critic who was openly homosexual. Shortly after their meeting, Ross moved into Wilde’s family home and, according to many sources, the two began an affair. From that point on, Wilde became more open in his favour of the company and attentions of young men and embraced the hidden side of London’s nightlife, regularly arranging rendezvous with young male 'renters'. Frequent instances of public affection scandalised London society, one occurring in Kettner’s restaurant in Soho when Wilde kissed a waiter. Wilde’s accusation of libel led to his own trial In 1891, Wilde embarked on a tempestuous affair with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, a handsome and poetic 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate. Douglas was Wilde’s beloved, talented muse but was also a petulant burden who was often reckless with both Wilde’s affections and money. The couple argued and reconciled frequently. In one letter in mid-1894, Wilde wrote to Bosie: “I can’t live without you. You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north and south, towards sun and moon — and, above all, yourself.” Suspecting a relationship between his son and the playwright, Bosie’s father – John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry – began harassing Wilde in an attempt to sever the connection. In February 1895, Queensberry left a calling card at the Albemarle Club in London, where Wilde was a member. The message on the card read: “For Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite [sic]" – though there is still debate about the actual words and meaning, due to Queensberry’s handwriting. Wilde took exception to the message, believing it a public accusation of the crime of sodomy. Against the advice of many of his friends, including Robbie Ross, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Queensberry was well known for his pugnacious attitude and outspoken nature: he gathered copious evidence that Wilde had solicited male prostitutes and he coerced witnesses to testify against the writer. Despite deploying his characteristic wit during the trial, Wilde was unable to refute Queensberry’s accusation. In a humiliating reversal, the marquess was acquitted and immediately prepared to bring charges against Wilde, for ‘gross indecency’ and sodomy – charges which criminalised homosexual people and no longer exist in the UK. A common myth endures that the magistrate delayed Wilde’s arrest warrant in order to allow him time to catch the last ferry from Dover and escape the charges. However, as Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson writes, this is unlikely for a number of reasons, including the fact that there were still four trains from London to Paris which would have left after the time ofhis eventual arrest. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/06/GettyImages-3315263-7a1b8ae.jpg" width="2072" height="2851" alt="John Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry who was tried and acquitted for libelling Oscar Wilde in a case which ultimately led to Wilde's imprisonment. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="John Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry who was tried and acquitted for libelling Oscar Wilde in a case which ultimately led to Wilde's imprisonment. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> On 6 April 1895, Wilde was arrested and charged, and two hugely public and damaging trials followed, in which Wilde pleaded not guilty. In a memorable moment from the first trial, which opened on 26 April at the Old Bailey, Wilde was fiercely cross-examined over the meaning of the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”. The words were from one of Bosie’s poems and thought by the prosecution to be a euphemism for homosexuality. Wilde’s defence of the term drew cheers within the court: “[It] is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.” After the two trials, Wilde – along with Bosie, who had escaped to safety on the continent before the charges were brought – was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ by a jury on 25 May 1895. Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour, a punishment described as “totally inadequate” by the judge, given the “seriousness” of his “crime”. Wilde wrote one of his most famous works from his cell in Reading gaol Wilde was imprisoned first in Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons, before being moved to Reading gaol in November 1895. During his transfer via Clapham Junction station he was recognised on the platform while manacled to a warden – he was subjected to abuse and spat on by his previously adoring public. Before the 1898 Prison Act, which reformed the aims and methods of incarceration in Britain, the British prison system was designed to subject prisoners to harsh physical labour and silent meditation on their crimes. Wilde’s life in prison was arduous and grim: he spent 23 hours a day in his cell, with hardly any contact with other prisoners, and was required to labour on a treadmill. He became ill with dysentery during his incarceration. Though Wilde was forbidden from writing plays, prose or poetry while serving his sentence, he was permitted to write letters. He realised that the prison regulations did not specify how long a letter should be and, if a letter were not finished, then the prisoner may be allowed take it with him when he left the prison. Frankenstein at 200: the birth of a gothic monster From Austen & Brontë to Woolf: literature’s forgotten female friendships So, over the final three months of his sentence, Wilde worked on the letter that would be later known as De Profundis (Latin for “from the depths”). He addressed the letter to Douglas, beginning: “Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine.” The letter contains many references to their relationship and to Wilde’s feelings about Christianity and Jesus Christ. Wilde never revised De Profundis after his release from Reading gaol in 1897 and it wasn’t published until after his death: first in part by Robbie Ross in 1905; and later in full by Wilde's youngest son, Vyvyan, in 1949. He died destitute in Paris – but not of syphilis Upon his release, Wilde was irrevocably marred by his imprisonment; his health was suffering and he was financially ruined. He retired to the continent and assumed the name of Sebastian Melmoth – inspired by Melmoth the Wanderer, a 19th-century Gothic novel by Irish writer Charles Maturin. Wilde lived for the most part impoverished and alone, occasionally joined and supported by former associates, including a short-lived reunion with Bosie in Naples in August 1897. Though Oscar’s wife, Constance, continued to support him with a financial stipend for some time after his release, she remained in England with their two sons and changed their surname to ‘Holland’ to escape scandal. Wilde remained estranged from his family until his wife’s death in 1898. With the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) – a scathing indictment of the Victorian penal system first published under Wilde’s prisoner identification number, C3-3 – he wrote little else of literary significance during this time. He told one friend: "I can write, but have lost the joy of writing." Wilde’s health continued to decline and he suffered public abuse and humiliation, often ridiculed and jeered by those who recognised him. Though there is a common misconception that Wilde died of syphilis – propagated by British journalist and author Arthur Ransome, who in a 1912 biography claimed syphilis as the cause of Wilde’s death – the playwright died aged 46 on 30 November 1900 after suffering from meningitis. On his deathbed, Wilde is reported to have remarked: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.” The writer died at the shabby Hotel D’Alsace in Paris in the company of a few friends including Robbie Ross and a Catholic priest, who baptised Wilde before his death. Oscar Wilde left behind a complicated legacy: Merlin Holland has written that, as well as a writer of stature, his grandfather was also "a convict, a homosexual, a bankrupt... and a charismatic figure prepared to stand up for what he believed in". Wilde was posthumously pardoned for his convictions in 2017, when the UK government’s ‘Turing Law’ (named after the British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing) exonerated more than 50,000 men who had been convicted of crimes for homosexuality that no longer exist. Elinor Evans is Deputy Digital Editor of HistoryExtra.com This article was first published in June 2018
Mary, Queen of Scots: what happened to her ladies-in-waiting?
They witnessed first-hand the most eventful periods in Mary Stuart's life, accompanying her everywhere and enjoying the lavish court entertainments so important to 16th-century monarchy. But what happened to the four girls appointed to be companions and, later, ladies-in-waiting, to the Queen of Scots?
Melita Thomas, editor of Tudor Times, investigates the fate of Mary's ladies... “Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael and me” So runs the old ballad, remembering the four friends and companions of a fifth Mary – Mary Stuart, the romantic and ill-fated Queen of Scots. The queen’s fate is well known – she was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587 for her complicity in a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I. But who were her four Marys, and what became of them? Mary Stuart was Mary, Queen of Scots in her cradle. Her early years were spent in an atmosphere of unease as her mother, Marie de Guise, sought to protect her from the predatory Scottish nobles who fought for the regency and for control of the little queen. The nobility was divided between those who supported the traditional French and Catholic alliance that Marie represented, and those who looked to a newly Protestant England to support the burgeoning Scottish Reformation. Who betrayed Mary, Queen Of Scots? Despite this tension, Marie de Guise sought to give her daughter a happy childhood, and appointed four girls to be her companions and, later, ladies-in-waiting. What all the girls had in common, as well as their Christian name, was noble birth and similarity in age to the queen. There was also – whether deliberately or not – a pun in the choice of girls called Mary, as ‘marie’ was the Scots word for a maid, derived from the Icelandic ‘maer’. The ballad above is slightly wrong on the names – they were Seton, Beaton, Fleming and Livingston. Fleming’s mother, Janet, Lady Fleming was the illegitimate half-sister of Mary’s father, James V, and Livingston was the daughter of the queen’s guardian, Alexander, 5th Lord Livingston of Callendar. Beaton’s grandfather was first cousin to Cardinal David Beaton, one of the men vying for the role of regent, while Seton was the daughter of George, 4th Lord Seton, and she and Beaton were also daughters of two of Marie de Guise’s ladies-in-waiting. An ultimate guide to the Tudors The four Marys in France The location Marie de Guise chose as most likely to keep the queen safe during these troubled times was the almost impregnable fortress of Stirling Castle. However, it soon became apparent that this was not a long-term solution. The English government, first under Henry VIII, Mary’s great-uncle, and then the lord protector and council of Edward VI, were determined that she should marry Edward VI – a view supported by some of the Scots nobles. Did Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots really meet? Marie de Guise, and the pro-French faction among the nobles, were determined to prevent this, favouring the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France – especially when it came well lubricated with French pensions – and intended her to marry the French heir, Dauphin Francois [son of King Henri II]. In preparation for an escape to France, the queen was sent first to Inchmahome Priory, and then to Dumbarton on the coast. It was at Inchmahome that the four Marys joined her household. In 1548, they set sail for France. The girls endured a rough crossing – all except the queen were afflicted by seasickness. Livingston and Fleming at least had the consolation of travelling with their families, since Lord Livingston and Lady Fleming as guardian and governess accompanied the queen. On arrival, Mary was immediately taken into the household of King Henri’s children, while her four friends were sent away. Henri II’s motive for separating Mary from her companions was two-fold: first, he wanted her to speak French, rather than Scots, and second, he wanted her closest friends to be his daughters, the Princesses Elisabeth and Claude. Not that Henri was averse to a Scots tete-a-tete – Lady Fleming was sent home in disgrace after bearing him a son. Listen | Historian, author and broadcaster Kate Williams tells the dramatic story of Mary, Queen of Scots and reflects on her doomed relationship with Elizabeth I of England The four Marys were dispatched to the Dominican Royal Priory of Saint Louis at Poissy. Far from being a backwater, Poissy was at the forefront of Renaissance learning, with close ties to the court. There, the Marys would have received a thorough Humanist education, as well as learning all the skills necessary to be wives of noblemen, and attendants on a queen. Seton seems to have been trained in hairdressing, too. Her skill in dressing her mistress’s head – first when Mary’s lustrous auburn hair was the toast of European courts, then afterward, when it thinned and greyed and was augmented by wigs – was remarked on. Later, the Marys returned to the queen’s household, where they enjoyed such domestic pleasures as making marmalade and crystallised fruit. At the centre of the Scottish court, 1561–68 Mary married Francois in 1558. Following her brief period as queen of France, the widowed Mary [Francois died in December 1560] returned to Scotland in 1561, aged 18, and ready to take up the burden of personal sovereignty. Her Marys returned with her as ladies-in-waiting. The first years in Scotland were taken up with Mary’s determination to control the complex political situation with which she was faced. A group of nobles, led by James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray (Mary’s half-brother), and calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation, had converted (some with rather more sincerity than others) to Protestantism, and changed the official religion of Scotland. This led them to look for support from Protestant England, rather than Catholic France. When was the last battle between England and Scotland? Mary – no religious fanatic – tried to steer a course between the different factions that sought to dominate her. When not engaged in state business, the queen recreated some of the splendour of the court of France, and in this she was ably assisted by her Marys. The four Marys went everywhere with the queen, even accompanying her to parliament in 1563. They had stools in her chamber, when to sit in the presence of the monarch was an extraordinary honour; they waited on her at table; and they took leading roles in the lavish court entertainments so important to 16th-century monarchy. They danced at masques, played music for visiting ambassadors, rode, hunted and hawked with the queen and her nobles. More informally, they joined Mary in dressing up as burgesses’ wives to walk around Edinburgh and St Andrew’s, shopping in the market and cooking, in a faint foreshadowing of another doomed queen, Marie Antoinette. They even donned male costume – on one occasion at a banquet for the French ambassador, as well as for practical reasons when hunting – outraging the sensibilities of the increasingly dominant religious radicals. The downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots Mary was unfortunate in that her greatest enemy at home was John Knox. Knox, a militant Calvinist, was even more misogynistic than most men of the age, and spent a good deal of time inveighing against female rule in such delightful tomes as “The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women”, and haranguing Mary in both public and private. Knox made the most of every innocent pastime derived from youth and high spirits at the queen’s court to insinuate that the queen and her entourage, including the Marys, lived immoral lives. Pressure mounted for the queen to remarry – there were many at home and abroad who had their eyes on the crown – and even Mary’s person. In a frightening incident a foolish young poet, Chastelard, was found hiding under the royal bed. Mary, too nervous to sleep alone thereafter, took Fleming as her ‘bedfellow’. The queen’s affection for her Marys was one argument used to persuade her to take a husband, as they had all vowed to remain single while she did. Mary did remarry in July 1565, but life for all of the Marys would probably have been better had she stayed a widow – the marriage to Lord Darnley [who she wed in 1565] proved disastrous. The Marys in love Whatever the Marys’ earlier matrimonial intentions, the first of them, Livingston, was married in March 1565 to John Sempill, son of Robert, Lord Sempill. Knox, who had referred to Livingston as “lusty”, suggested the match was rushed – Livingston and Sempill, who was a noted dancer, had been tripping the light fantastic with gusto and from this, Knox inferred that she was pregnant. It seems unlikely, as the betrothal took place a year before the wedding and the first of their several children was not born until a year after it. The queen attended the elaborate ceremony, and gave them a gift of a bed hung with scarlet and black velvet, with embroidered taffeta curtains and silk fringes, as well as land, drawing Knox’s fire again for granting lands to courtiers. Livingston remained at court as keeper of the queen’s jewels. When Mary made a will in 1566, Livingston drew up a minute inventory of her jewels – specimens of which were bequeathed to the Marys, should the queen die in childbed. Beaton, considered the best looking of the four Marys, caught the eye of Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador. Around twice her age, perhaps he hoped that his position would attract her. The queen’s biographer, John Guy, refers to them as lovers, but it seems unlikely that one of the queen's closest friends would expose Mary to the risks of confidential information leaking out – unless Beaton were acting in concert with Mary, extracting information from Randolph. Beaton must have had the reputation of being politically influential with the queen, as she received letters and gifts from the wife of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, one of the other English ambassadors. Beaton was courted by Randolph for some time, but in 1566 married Alexander Ogilvy, by whom she had at least one son. Beaton died in around 1598, and her widower promptly married Lady Jean Gordon, the wife whom James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, had thrown off to marry Queen Mary. Livingston was full of spirits and Beaton was the prettiest, but Fleming apparently carried the palm for overall attractiveness. As ‘Queen of the Bean’ at the Twelfth Night ceremonies in 1564, she was dressed in cloth of silver and jewels, and this “flower of the flock’s” dazzling looks attracted poetry and prose panegyrics. Fleming was courted in 1564 by William Maitland of Lethington. Maitland had a chequered history in Mary’s service: one of the few nobles who was Protestant by conviction, he had joined the Lords of the Congregation and was a friend of Sir William Cecil, the English secretary of state, whose whole life was dedicated to eliminating Mary. Maitland failed to warn Mary of the plot to murder her secretary, David Rizzio, and it is likely, too, that he knew of the plot against Darnley. [Darnley and a group of Protestant nobles stabbed to death Rizzio on 9 March 1566, after they convinced him Rizzio was Mary's lover. Mary could never forgive Darnley, who was himself murdered on 9 February 1567.] Fleming, of course, probably had no idea of the extent of Maitland’s duplicity. Maitland seems to have fallen headlong in love with her, and his passion was the subject of some mockery at court –nearly 20 years older than she was, he was described by one courtier as being as “suitable for her as I am to be pope”. Maitland has been identified as a prime suspect for the forger of the casket letters, which triggered accusations that Mary was complicit in Darnley’s murder. [The letters contain eight missives and a series of sonnets said to have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell, between January and April 1567. They were produced as evidence against Queen Mary by the Scottish lords who opposed her rule]. Whatever his machinations, Maitland later became an adherent of what was known as the Queen's Party that wished to restore her, if not to full monarchy, at least to regency for her son, James. The Queen’s Party, which included Fleming and Maitland, held Edinburgh Castle in 1573, but when it was captured by the English they were handed over to the Regent, Morton. Fleming was freed, struggling to retain her diamond and ruby chain that had been Queen Mary’s, while Maitland, carried out of the castle on a litter, died before he could be brought to trial. Suicide was rumoured. The King's Party planned to hang, draw and quarter his dead body, but Fleming wrote to Cecil, asking him to intervene. He passed the plea to Elizabeth, who requested the Scottish lords to spare the body. Fleming waited until 1583 for Maitland’s lands to be restored. She and Maitland had two children – a son, James, converted to the old faith and fled to France, while their daughter, Margaret, became Countess of Roxburghe. The fourth Mary, Seton, never married, but stayed with her mistress for many years. After the surrender at Carberry Hill [Mary surrendered and later went to exile in England following the battle of Carberry Hill, 15 June 1567, which took place near Edinburgh after a number of Scottish lords objected Mary’s rule following her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell, who was widely believed to have murdered her previous husband Lord Darnley], she joined Mary in captivity at Lochleven Castle. By standing at a window, dressed in the queen's clothes, she gave Mary time to slip out of the castle, and escape across the loch in a rowing boat. Later, when Mary fled to even more onerous imprisonment in England, Seton was permitted to join her, and spent 15 years incarcerated in the gloomy series of castles where Mary wore her life away. In 1570 Seton's mother wrote to her, and was apprehended by the King's Party, who sought to banish her from Scotland for communicating with Mary's household. Elizabeth intervened, requesting forbearance “if the cause be no greater” than writing to her daughter. By 1583, even Seton's devotion and health were tried by the long imprisonment, and she was given leave to retire to a French convent at Rheims. Seton lived on to see her mistress's son inherit the crown of England, before dying in 1615. She was buried in the convent she had dwelt in for more than 30 years. Were her last thoughts of the charismatic queen she had served so faithfully, or did it all seem a distant dream? “But why should I fear a nameless grave When I've hopes for eternity…. There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary [Fleming] and me”. Melita Thomas is the editor of Tudor Times, a website about daily life in the period. Visit www.tudortimes.co.uk to find out more. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2015.
Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry
David Reynolds explores how commemoration of the First World War has changed over the past 100 years...
At first sight, British remembrance of war has changed little over the last century. The Cenotaph and the Two-Minute Silence date from 1919, the Poppy Appeal from 1921. Yet the continuity of ritual masks profound changes in British attitudes to remembrance. To explore these changes takes us into broader issues of national identity and even foreign policy. The Great War was the deadliest in Britain’s history, with nearly three quarters of a million killed. It was impossible to bring such a large number of bodies home. Indeed many soldiers had been literally blown to bits by shellfire and their remains were never found. So the dead were interred and commemorated along the battlefronts in nearly a thousand cemeteries and monuments constructed by the Imperial War Graves Commission in one of the biggest public works projects of the 1920s. Among the missing was Jack Kipling – only son of the celebrated author Rudyard Kipling – who was last seen stumbling in agony across the battlefield of Loos in September 1915 with half his face blown off. Jack could have got a medical exemption because of short-sight but he and his father were gung-ho patriots. After 1918 Kipling threw his energies into the war graves project, like the architect Edwin Lutyens and the administrator Fabian Ware. Too old to fight, these were men consumed with grief and probably guilt about the young men who had been sent to their deaths. During the war itself the public knew little of the gruesome reality of modern industrialised killing. Press reporters were strictly controlled and there was virtually no film footage of combat or bodies. But during the twenties, the veil was partially lifted in veterans’ novels and memoirs. Particularly powerful was the play Journey’s End by RC Sherriff. Set in a gloomy dugout on the western front, it depicted British soldiers bickering and drinking as they psyched themselves up for the next German onslaught. The 1928 play had little action but it proved a runaway West End success, praised for its ‘realism’ in bringing alive the horrors of the trenches. The author JB Priestley called it “the strongest plea for peace I know”. How have traditions of remembrance evolved? A second war As the thirties progressed, this link between peace and remembrance tightened. Many people felt that the dead would not have died in vain if 1914–18 proved, in the cliché of the time, ‘the war to end war’. In other words, peace would be the truest form of remembrance. By the mid-1930s Britain had the largest peace movement in the world. Over a third of the population – 11.5 million people – signed the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’ of 1935, with an overwhelming majority registering support for the League of Nations and for an end to the arms trade. And, as war clouds gathered in 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his own bid for peace in a desperate deal with Hitler at Munich. Chamberlain was another of the generation who was too old to fight. He had never recovered from the death in action of his younger cousin and closest friend, Norman. But on 3 September 1939 Britain was at war once again with Germany: all the peace-talk and peace-making had come to nothing. This new war was profoundly different from the last. All through the Great War there had been a western front, but in 1940 the fall of France in four weeks left Britain fighting on alone. Unlike 1914–18, the country was heavily bombed and menaced by imminent invasion: 1940 became immortalised in Churchill’s celebrated phrase as Britain’s ‘finest hour’. And this war, unlike the last, ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender and complete occupation by the Allies, by which time the utter bestiality of Nazism had been revealed in camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald. This seemed clearly a ‘good war’ – and it had been won at half the human cost of the last for Britain. In the 1920s and 1930s the British continued to refer to 1914–18 as the Great War. But after 1945 they adopted American terminology, and spoke of ‘the First World War’ and the ‘Second World War’. This accentuated the sense that 1914–18 had been an inconclusive opening round, which needed another round to finish the job. After 1945, both Armistice Day on the 11th of November and the Two-Minute silence fell out of fashion. Instead, the dead of both world wars were honoured on the nearest weekend, known as Remembrance Sunday. In the 1950s and 1960s the British seemed obsessed with Hitler’s war – commemorating, even celebrating it, in more than a hundred colour movies showing squared-jawed, stiff-upper-lipped heroes such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd fighting evil Nazis in films such as The Cruel Sea and The Dam Busters. Read about the great misconceptions of the First World War Preoccupied with the era of Churchill and Hitler, the British paid little attention to 1914–18, but the 50th anniversary brought the conflict alive for a new generation. The blockbuster BBC TV series The Great War screened hitherto unseen footage of the trenches in surreal black and white. And the meaning of the war was questioned in books such as Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, which popularised the phrase that British Tommies had been ‘lions led by donkeys’. This theme of innocent soldiers sent to their deaths by bone-headed upper-class generals was dramatised in Oh! What a Lovely War – an experimental play that mushroomed into a West End hit and a global movie. The tragedy of the soldiers is played out in front of a news panel displaying headline points about the fighting, such as “November… Somme Battle Ends… Total Loss 1,332,000 Men…Gain Nil”. At one point, Field-Marshal Haig (played by John Mills) asserts with aristocratic insouciance: “The loss of, say, another 300,000 men may lead to really great results.” In fact Oh! What a Lovely War revealed more about sixties’ attitudes to class and country than about what actually happened in 1914–18, but its impact has been enduring. This was also the decade when the British discovered the ‘War Poets’. Some 2,200 writers published poetry about the Great War between 1914 and 1918, 25 per cent of them women and fewer than 20 per cent men in uniform. Yet since the 1960s, thanks largely to 50th-anniversary anthologies, a handful of ‘soldier poets’ have become the true interpreters of the war for generations of schoolchildren through the English literature curriculum. Supreme among them was Wilfred Owen, whose poems evoked the ‘pity of war’ and whose death in action a week before the Armistice seemed to sum up its futility. Recently some revisionist military historians have contested these sixties stereotypes of the generals, insisting that the British Army learned from the disastrous first day of the Somme, developing into an efficient war machine that combined infantry, tanks, artillery and aircraft to deadly effect in the autumn of 1918. But this ‘learning curve’ was greased with an appalling amount of blood: whether such a costly education can be justified remains a matter of debate. Noble sacrifice? It was in the sixties that British remembrance of the Great War set firm, heightening the contrast with the positive remembrance of 1939–45. All the belligerent countries, I would argue, see 1914–18 through the lens of 1939–45, but the refractions vary from place to place. Consider two examples. In France, ‘La Grande Guerre’ remains a noble sacrifice to rid the country of German occupation, whereas 1940–44 is remembered as ‘the dark years’ – humiliating defeat in 1940, and then shameful collaboration with Nazi genocide. In West Germany after 1945, there was no denying the crimes of Nazism, even if these were initially blamed on Hitler and a criminal few rather than acknowledging the complicity of the population as a whole. But until the 1960s, Germans still thought of 1914–18 as a necessary war of defence against Russian and French encirclement. But then the writings of leftist historian Fritz Fischer persuaded many Germans to see 1914–18 as the forerunner of 1939–45, with both wars as episodes in a long story of militaristic expansion since the days of Bismarck. And so in France and West Germany, like Britain, the two world wars were interlocked in cultural memory. But, unlike Britain, both these countries found a way of escaping from the prison of memory. In 1957, together with Italy and the Benelux states, they signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community. In effect, the EEC represented a peace treaty for western Europe, drawing a line under not only the Second World War but also the grim cycle of Franco-German wars that stretched back before 1939 and 1914 to the days of Bismarck, Napoleon and Louis XIV. For France, Germany and their neighbours, European integration has offered a way out of their darkly entangled history, transmuting pained remembrance of the past into bright hope for the future. Awkward partner In Britain this exit strategy has never had much appeal. Not until the British empire had largely been liquidated did Britain, in 1973, join the European Community but the country remains an ‘awkward partner’, frequently at odds with majority policy. Our distinctive patterns of war remembrance are, I think, an important part of the explanation. The First World War, costly yet inconclusive, left troubling questions about whether Britain should have intervened on the continent. The Second World War – in which Britain triumphed with the help of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ of the Commonwealth and the United States – accentuated that sense of distance, so that the Atlantic often seems narrower than the Channel. For Britain the last third of the 20th century stood in marked contrast with what had come before. With the retreat from empire, compulsory military service was abandoned. Apart from the Falklands, foreign wars seemed a relic of the past. But over the last quarter-century, war has returned to our national agenda, in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. The deaths of young soldiers today give new life and meaning to stories and poems from Britain’s greatest war. The two-minute silence has gained new resonance, likewise the Poppy Appeal. Yet what is being remembered is largely the sixties version of the Great War – a story of mud, blood and class conflict, a cultural memory that is stuck in the trenches and trapped in Poets’ Corner. The 50th anniversary was profoundly important for shaping images of 1914–18. Will the centenary change those rooted assumptions? Maybe this time we shall develop a broader sense of the conflict, one in which the home front matters as much as the western front. Perhaps we shall appreciate the impact of the war on women as well as men, not least in breaking the bitter deadlock over female suffrage. We might also grasp the conflict’s global nature – its impact on countries such as India, China and Japan, its effects on the Middle East, which endure to the present day in Syria, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Above all, after the catharsis of the centenary, maybe we shall start to move on from remembrance to understanding. After all, no veterans are alive today who served in the conflict: quite literally, no one can ‘remember’ the Great War. In fact, we are now as far from the men who marched away in 1914 than they were from the Redcoats who fought Napoleon at Waterloo. Of course we should honour the dead but I believe we must also try to understand the Great War as history – history that still casts a long shadow across the world today. David Reynolds is professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. This article was first published in the December 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine
We've allowed memoirs to shape our perception of the First World War without paying due attention to their drawbacks for the historian, says Mark Bostridge
This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine In the early weeks of the First World War, a young woman in an English provincial town happened to bump into a man whose proposal of marriage she had rejected in no uncertain terms the previous year. In her diary she recorded her strong disapproval of him for not having responded immediately to the call of duty by enlisting in the army. The language she used to describe him was reminiscent of the ‘White Feather Brigade’, the band of women across Britain who had recently begun a campaign to humiliate men perceived as ‘idlers and loafers’ into enlisting. White feathers were being distributed to any man who appeared to fit the description ‘selfish shirker’. The woman meeting her former suitor didn’t go so far as to present him with a white feather, but in her diary she recorded “his obvious strength and suitability for military work”, and branded him a “shirker”. Not long before, this same woman had shown her younger brother an appeal in the newspapers for unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 30 to join the army. Her brother had immediately become enthusiastic about volunteering, and had set about trying to offer himself as a recruit. His sister’s eagerness to support his desire to enlist was matched only by their father’s obduracy in opposing the plan. As the brother was 18 and under military age, he needed his father’s consent before his application could be accepted by the War Office; this his father at first withheld, much to his sister’s fury. In her diary she fulminated against her father, reproaching him for his “unmanliness” and for not possessing the “requisite courage”. Her younger brother did eventually obtain their father’s permission, and was gazetted as a second lieutenant in a battalion of the Sherwood Foresters. Two years later, he showed great courage in action on one of the most terrible days of slaughter in the history of the British Army, the first day of the battle of the Somme. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his “conspicuous gallantry and leadership” during an attack on Mouquet Farm near Thiepval. For his sister, by now serving as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, there was understandable pride in her brother’s heroism, but also a belief that the Somme offensive had opened “very successfully”, and a conviction that 1 July 1916 was “one of the greatest dates in history”. None of these scenarios is unusual. Indeed, each of them is strongly representative of its time and place. The brother, Edward, was killed in the final months of the war during the British rout of the Austrian offensive on the Asiago Plateau in northern Italy in June 1918. His sister, Vera Brittain, went on to become a leading writer of the interwar years, as well as a campaigning feminist and latterly a major pacifist figure during the Second World War. Her name will immediately strike a chord as the chronicler of the so-called lost generation in her most famous book, Testament of Youth, a memoir of her war experiences and of the cataclysmic impact of the Great War on her own life and the lives of her closest male friends. However, what may come as a surprise to the many readers of Testament of Youth is that the first two of the incidents I’ve described above are completely absent from the book, while the third, her reaction to Edward Brittain’s part in the battle of the Somme, has been extensively rewritten from her contemporary accounts in diaries and letters, and overlaid with sentiments much more in keeping with the antiwar views that Vera Brittain had held since 1918. Writing her autobiography 15 to 20 years after the events it described, Vera Brittain was evidently reluctant to probe too deeply her younger self’s susceptibility to what the mature Brittain described as “the glamour of war”, the patriotic excitement (verging at times on jingoistic fervour) that she exhibited in 1914, or her absolute conviction of the need to defeat German militarism. Instead she constructed a narrative in which her predominant themes are disillusionment with war and a firmly held belief of the conflict’s futility. None of this is to deny the lasting power of Testament of Youth as a great work of literature, nor even to suggest that the book doesn’t have a significant contribution to make to our understanding of the First World War. It remains arguably the greatest work of love, loss and remembrance to emerge from the war. As Brittain’s closest friend, the writer Winifred Holtby, recognised – in a description that is as true today as it was when she wrote it 85 years ago – “Others have borne witness to the wastage, the pity and the heroism of modern war; none has yet so convincingly conveyed its grief.” Originally published in 1933, at the tail-end of the boom in war literature, Testament of Youth quickly became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The book tells of Brittain’s struggle to win an education for herself at Oxford University, of her growing love for her brother Edward’s school friend Roland Leighton, and of her decision to postpone her university education to enrol as a VAD nurse. She served in hospitals in London, Malta and close to the frontline in France. Following the armistice, she returned to Oxford. But she went up without the company of her male contemporaries, because by that time all of them– fiancé Roland, brother Edward and two close friends, Victor and Geoffrey – had been killed in the war. Triumphantly republished by Virago 40 years ago in 1978, the book became a bestseller again when the BBC adapted it the following year for television. In 2015, Testament of Youth topped the bestseller charts once more on the release of the feature-film adaptation starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington. A century on from the armistice that finally silenced the guns, Testament of Youth is the most widely read British autobiography of the First World War, ironically probably more familiar to readers today than the famous male memoirs by Graves, Sassoon and Blunden that inspired it. The canonical autobiographies of the war, such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy beginning with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War – as well as Brittain’s book, the best-known by a woman – have done much to shape later generations' perceptions of the First World War. Second only to the poetry produced in the years 1914–18, these memoirs have decisively influenced the way the First World War is taught in schools and universities, portrayed on television and in cinema, and written about in modern fiction and non-fiction. This has been for good and bad – bad not least because they are hardly representative of the enormous variety of autobiographical writing thrown up by the war. As we approach the end of the centenary period of 1914–18, it’s worth considering the strengths and limitations of these books, and what they have to tell us about larger questions of memory and detachment in relation to remembrance of the war. The first and most obvious proviso to make about any autobiographical piece of writing is that it is inherently subjective. The second is that, as a literary form, autobiography is a hybrid: it combines elements of fact with fiction in order to create a continuous, flowing narrative. What is more, autobiography, as the critic Candace Lang has observed, is everywhere one cares to find it. For example, many of the novels produced in the aftermath of the war are so closely based on the writers' experiences that they can almost be legitimately regarded as memoirs. A clear case of this is Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, published in 1929 (better known in its expurgated version, Her Privates We). Manning’s prefatory note makes his autobiographical intent transparent. His book was “a record of experience on the Somme and on the Ancre fronts… and the events described in it actually happened”. Sassoon had it both ways, and his Memoirs of George Sherston are an illustration of the complex relationship between autobiography and fiction. The publisher initially described Memoirs as fiction with a difference: “The author… has himself lived the life of his hero.” But Sherston, the trilogy’s protagonist, is not Sassoon. For a start, he is not a poet. Yet his wartime exploits often reflect Sassoon’s – increasingly so as the trilogy reaches its close, where Sassoon’s own war diary is reproduced without being transmuted into fiction. Meanwhile, both Graves and Brittain produced fictional versions of their war experiences before settling on autobiography to tell their stories. Graves destroyed his war novel, but one page survived to be inserted unrevised into Goodbye to All That – or, as Graves put it, without having to “re-translate it into history”. Goodbye to All That was written hurriedly in 11 weeks, largely as a money-making enterprise. Its tall stories are among the book’s most enjoyable features. For instance, Graves tells us that machine-gun crews often fired off several belts without pause to heat the water in the cooling-jacket for making tea. This rather assumes that they preferred their tea laced with oil! However, in the face of criticism by Sassoon and Blunden of more serious inaccuracies in Goodbye to All That – they unkindly dubbed it “Mummy’s Bedtime Story Book” – Graves made a passionate defence of the book as the emotional truth about his war. He argued that the memoirs of any man who had experienced trench warfare weren’t truthful if they didn’t contain “a high proportion of falsities”. The “old trench-mind”, he wrote, “is at work in all overestimation of casualties… mixing of dates and confusion between trench rumours and scenes actually witnessed”. Sassoon’s own ruminations about the memoirs of the First World War come close to confirming one overriding truth that applies to most of them: what these books have in common is that the writers are looking back cathartically to a fundamentally altered self – irreparably changed, often even damaged, by the war. But the conundrum for Sassoon, as it is for the other memoirists, is that there is an “essential disparity” between ‘“being alive [,] and memorialising it long afterwards”. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that the survivors of the First World War returned not enriched “but impoverished in communicable experience”, and that “what was widespread 10 years later in the flood of war books had nothing to do with any experience”. Sassoon took a more optimistic view of the task. He believed it was possible, long afterwards, to describe aspects of an individual’s experience of the war while at the same time acknowledging that some elements of it would be lost or changed. He saw “the living present” as a “jigsaw puzzle loose in its box”. Eventually it would be possible to fit the pieces together “and make a coherent picture of them”, but only when they’d become “static and solidly discernible”. Edmund Blunden was less sanguine about the desirability of doing this. In a sense, nothing could evoke the confusion of what the combatants of 1914–18 had been through other than a narrative that acknowledged the impossibility of attempting to convey the experience to its readers. In his description of the area around Ypres, where he had been stationed in 1917, Blunden declared that “a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents which characterised the time. The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence.” By contrast, Vera Brittain asserted the superiority of the women memoirist over her male counterparts by arguing that “a woman who worked with the armies can give a wider and more truthful picture of the war as a whole than the active-service man whose knowledge was confined to a small corner of the front”. To buttress this claim, she carefully researched the background to the war in historical records such as the collections of the British Red Cross and Imperial War Museum. She also employed a patchwork of quotations from her diary and wartime correspondence. Nevertheless, she was fearful of “numerous inaccuracies through queer tricks of memory”. For her highly inaccurate account of the Étaples mutiny (of British empire troops in France), which had occurred in September 1917 while she was serving at the camp as a nurse, she was forced to rely on little more than the memory of an ex-soldier and friend of Winifred Holtby, who had had no direct involvement in the events either. Brittain’s account of the period she spent as a VAD nurse at Étaples does not possess the reliability of chronology of earlier chapters of Testament of Youth. In part this is because she had ceased to keep a diary after returning from Malta in 1917, and had to depend on a few letters and rushed notes along with a sometimes hazy recollection of events some 15 years after they had taken place. Most tellingly, though, her description of nursing German prisoners of war highlights something more significant: the extent to which Testament of Youth is coloured by the spirit of internationalism and pacifism that Vera Brittain developed only in the years after the First World War. Contrary to Brittain’s narrative of German prisoners dying in vast numbers at Étaples, the official records for the hospital in the National Archives show a very low mortality rate – as low as 2 per cent – for the prisoner-patients during the time Brittain nursed there. Her chilling picture of the plight of her German patients is therefore largely fictional, but fits with the over-arching antiwar, war disillusionment theme of Testament of Youth. It may be a truism that time erodes memory and alters perspective, but it’s one that cannot be overstated when considering the autobiographies and memoirs of the First World War. Mark Bostridge is an award-winning author whose books include Vera Brittain and the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2014).
“We are all Trojans...”: Homer’s poetic legacy
Known all over the world as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer is believed to be the greatest of Ancient Greek epic poets. Here, Dr Antony Makrinos investigates…
The Greek poet Homer signifies the dawn of Western literature and his works include some of the most significant literary products of the human intellect. Homer is an enigmatic figure and there is still controversy about when and where he lived. The most common view is that he flourished in the 8th centry BC and that he composed the Iliad in 750 BC and the Odyssey in 725 BC. His epics describe events relating to the last year of the Trojan War, which is believed to have taken place approximately 400 years earlier than Homer. Much of the content of the Homeric epics appears to be consistent with the Aegean Late Bronze Age (12th centry BC) and in his works, Homer tried to reconstruct the remote past. In both his poems, Homer narrates the stories of epic heroes (mainly Achilles and Odysseus), who live in a heroic age. The Iliad and the Odyssey engage with the megathemes of human life: wrath and war, journey and return. The world of Homer is in many ways our own world. In this world we are offered the unique opportunity to explore the definition of being human. The message of the Homeric epics about the change of the human condition from absolute happiness to deserting misery is the message of human life itself. The Homeric epics are not only very modern texts in the sense that they teach us about the consequences of political dispute in times of crisis and war or about the desperation of refugees in their fight for survival. They are also texts that search for the deeper definition of the human and the divine. They are magnificent artistic mirrors reflecting in a geometrical way a complex world of emotions – that is, the human psyche itself. Concepts like honour, heroism, strife, hubris, guilt and revenge balance each other, offering the first seeds of Greek tragedy and comedy and justifying the catalytic impact of the Homeric epics on the world’s psychology, philosophy, politics, rhetoric and theatre. Homer’s legacy cannot easily be summarised because it is the story of a world that has been part of our entertainment and education for almost three millennia. In my talk I will demonstrate the impact of Homer’s epics on the literary work of Constantine P Cavafy (1863–1933), one of the most important modern Greek poets. I will do this by highlighting common themes between Homeric and Cavafean culture horizons but also by offering the audience the aesthetic pleasure of listening to three of Cavafy’s poems in English with live piano accompaniment. Hence, I am hoping to explore the audience’s emotions through a combined experience of academic talk, poetic reading and music. Constantine P Cavafy is often characterised as the “poet of old age” because he has acquired his distinct poetic features late in his life. In his poems he summarises the anxiety of the human soul when faced with the greatest obstacles of life: loneliness, isolation, sorrow, despair, separation, vanity, old age and death. His protagonists are not crashed by the difficulties but preserve their dignity and face failure with courage. Although he is influenced by romanticism and symbolism, Cavafy’s writing is original and possesses classical quality. Most of his themes are taken from the Greek historical and mythological past and the real world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Homers20Iliad-1543cb5.jpg" width="800" height="800" alt="Achilles, the hero of Homer's epic poem the 'Iliad', bandaging the wound of his friend Patroclus" title="Achilles, the hero of Homer's epic poem the 'Iliad', bandaging the wound of his friend Patroclus. Decoration on the base of an antique vase. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" /> Artists from all over the world have been influenced by Cavafy’s poetry. He is considered to be the most important modern Greek poet, with international recognition, and his work has been translated in more than 200 languages all over the world. Cavafy’s reading of Homer is filtered through important translations of his time (into English by A Pope, into French by Mme Dacier and into modern Greek by A Pallis and J Polylas). Sometimes he also visited Homer’s original Greek text. From 1893, with Priam’s Night Journey, until 1911, with the publication of Ithaca, Cavafy constantly engaged with the world of Homer. The result of this engagement is several poems that are either inspired by Homer and the ancient Greek world. Cavafy has also produced a prose essay on the End of Odysseus (1895). In the poem Betrayal (1904) (alternative translations of the title: Perfidy, Unfaithfulness), Cavafy is inspired by Plato’s Republic. He composes a poem, which is a reflection of the Homeric gods, their anthropomorphic psychology, their imperfections and their human passions. The poet starts with the image of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Greek hero Achilles. The joyful atmosphere is reinforced by Apollo’s prophecy that the child born by this union will have a long and happy life. Thetis is happy about Apollo’s words and she rejoices when Achilles becomes the most beautiful hero of Thessaly. But soon the elders bring the bad news that Achilles was killed at Troy. And when Thetis, in her dramatic lamentation, remembers Apollo’s promises in her wedding about Achilles’ long and happy life, she asks in rage about the whereabouts of the “wise” prophet when her son was killed. The poem reaches its dramatic climax with the elders’ abrupt answer: Apollo himself went down to Troy and with the Trojans killed Achilles. At the very core of Cavafy’s poem the reader finds an ironic commentary on the tragedy of human life generated by the antithesis of Thetis’ ignorance and Apollo’s knowledge of the future. Apollo’s deception of Thetis is characteristic of the Homeric gods. Cavafy is eager to engage in a dialogue about the mechanics of mortality and immortality in the Homeric world. Apollo is the symbol of the deceptive god who represents the unpredictability of human life and death. Thetis, meanwhile, embodies the archetype of a very human mother who tries to strike a balance between her immortal nature and the mortality of her own son. With the poem Trojans (written in 1900 and published in 1905) Cavafy manages to move beyond Homer and comes closer to the creation of his own poetic universe. The poem is inspired by a famous episode of the Trojan War in the Iliad in which the leader of the Trojans, Hector decides to face the best of the Achaeans, Achilles in a duel outside the walls of Troy. Hector’s parents, king Priam and queen Hecuba are trying to convince Hector not to fight Achilles but without success. In his poem Achilles and Hector are not anymore the Homeric leaders of the Greeks and the Trojans who gained glory and fame through their battles at Troy. The poet transforms the Homeric heroes into universal symbols of our mortal life: Hector and the Trojans represent us, the common mortals who are paralysed by the fearful idea of death and try to flee its inevitability. We humans (including Cavafy) are the Trojans whose efforts are destined to fail when facing the supernatural force of Achilles, who symbolises the unstoppable reality of death. The walls of Troy symbolise our lives and they contain both individual and collective memories and emotions. Hector’s parents, Priam and Hecuba, are our friends and relatives who are weeping for our predestined mortality. Cavafy in the Trojans has transformed the Trojan War into the war of our lives, the war of survival of humanity against nothingness. Cavafy expresses through the Trojans his own sorrow for the mortal outcome of the human experience. The first version of Ithaca was written in 1894 and was entitled Second Odyssey. It was a poem written before Cavafy established his own poetic space and that is why it is said to suffer from literary congestion (it draws inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Tennyson’s Ulysses). The Second Odyssey narrated Odysseus’ decision to leave Ithaca because of the monotony of his life there. Ithaca is Cavafy’s masterpiece and the most famous of his poems. It was written in 1911 and belongs to his philosophical poems inspired by Greek mythology. The central idea of the poem is that people setting out for a purpose in their life acquire knowledge and experience, which are superior to this cause. However, this journey is not a Homeric return. It is the journey of life and Ithaca is the destination. Cavafy abolishes the very definition of the Homeric Odyssey as a song of return breaking free from the classical tradition and narrates a tale about the human journey of life. In this way Ithaca is a step beyond Homer and Dante and different than Tennyson because there is no change of course along the journey and there is no second departure after the return. If in the Second Odyssey Cavafy introduced for Odysseus a thirstiness for freedom away from love and affection of the family, in Ithaca there is advice for the pursuit of high intellect and rare emotion, the combination of bodily pleasure and knowledge of the mind. The Homeric protagonists of the Odyssean myth (Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Laertes) disappear in Cavafy’s Ithaca. Odysseus’ enemies (Laestrygonians, Cyclopes, Poseidon) are the obstacles that we encounter in our lives when our soul sets them before us. The poem is then transformed into a metaphor, which advises the reader on how to live the journey of life and how to acquire true wisdom. Cavafy understood that the Homeric epics are not only ancient texts, which entertain us and make us travel to the distant world of the mythological past. They are also stories that talk about our future as a human race and that educate us about the importance of ideas like friendship, fidelity, fatherland, family, fatherhood and motherhood, hospitality or concepts like loss, revenge, adultery and death. From this point of view Homer comes out from a well of time with depth of 28 centuries and demands not only to be read by us but also to be loved with passion and strength of soul as a compass that leads us to the understanding of our own self. Cavafy seems to know this when he proclaims: “Where Homer decided to halt and put a full stop, it is difficult and dangerous for anyone else to wish to continue. But it is in the difficult and dangerous tasks that the great craftsmen are successful”. Dr Antony Makrinos is a teaching fellow in the Classics Department at University College London. In 2016, as part of UCL’s Festival of Culture, he delivered a lecture about Homer’s Legacy in Cavafy’s poetry This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2016